David Daleiden Files Court Appeal Against Aborted Fetal Parts Industry

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SEATTLE (ChurchMilitant.com) - David Daleiden's legal team is asking a federal court to force traffickers in aborted baby parts to disclose their contact information. The Thomas More Society filed a notice of appeal in the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Tuesday, requesting that an order blocking such information be reversed.

Earlier this year, Daleiden, the investigative journalist who exposed Planned Parenthood's gruesome profitmaking scheme involving fetal parts, submitted a public records request to abortion mills, biotech companies and research centers throughout the nation as part of his ongoing investigation into the industry. Instead of turning over their records, the groups filed for restraining orders and court injunctions.

In this case, employees at the University of Washington and staff at an abortion mill are asking the court not to disclose their job titles or workplaces related to the university's Birth Defects Research Laboratory.

"The implications of this case are far-reaching," said Peter Breen, special counsel for the Thomas More Society, in a press release. "These records relate to government programs, performed by government employees, on government computers."

"Public employees and institutions have a responsibility to be accountable and transparent about how taxpayer money is being used," he continued. "They have no right to scrub their records of key information or to otherwise hide the work they are doing from the very public they are supposed to be serving."

"Our client, David Daleiden, was willing to receive the requested open records with the names removed, despite no legal requirement that he do so, in order to expedite the release of the records," Breen explained. "These public employees and abortion clinic personnel responded with legal action, in order to frustrate Mr. Daleiden's investigation and keep their activities out of the public eye."

Two congressional committees have recommended criminal prosecution for Planned Parenthood after overwhelming evidence proved it illegally sold and profited off organs, limbs and other body parts taken from aborted children — a violation of federal law.

After the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives concluded its year-long investigation finding the abortion giant guilty of breaking the law, the Senate Judiciary Committee issued its own 550-page report coming to the same conclusion. Among its findings, it declared:

[C]ompanies have charged thousands of dollars for specimens removed from a single aborted fetus; they have claimed the fees they charged only recovered acceptable costs when they had not, in fact, conducted any analysis of their costs when setting the fees; and their post hoc accounting rationalizations invoked a bevy of indirect and tenuously related costs in an attempt to justify their fees.

The report indicts the Obama administration for "the failure of the Department of Justice, across multiple administrations, to enforce the law that bans the buying or selling of human fetal tissue with even a single prosecution."

"[A]lthough the law's ban on buying or selling fetal tissue contains criminal penalties," it continued, "the Justice Department has never initiated a single prosecution for violating the law since its enactment in 1993," thus ensuring that those who break the law face "no meaningful risk of prosecution."

Lynch and Comey have yet to respond, and many hope the Trump administration, under the new leadership of future Attorney General Jeff Sessions, will proceed with the criminal prosecutions.

"I'd be shocked if it doesn’t happen," said Tom McClusky, vice president of government affairs at March for Life Action. "I'd also be shocked if they didn't find something prosecutable."

Kristin Hawkins, president of Students for Life, echoed the same sentiments. "We're looking forward to Sen. Sessions becoming Attorney General Sessions and investigating this, and, yes, prosecuting Planned Parenthood for their crimes."

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